The Shocking Story of Helmuth Schmidt, page 12
Mar. 11, 1917: Augusta Steinbach disappears
Gillespie shook his head and looked at the skeleton outline. The confrontation he just witnessed raised a troubling question: what had happened to Anita Schmidt and Margareta Baersch? Perhaps investigators would find the answer concealed somewhere on the Lakewood chicken farm. The prosecutor immediately sent a wire to Ocean County prosecutor Richard C. Plummer requesting a search of the place. Adele’s statement suggested one promising spot: the old well that Braun covered at about the time the housekeeper disappeared. Gertrude also agreed to sketch a map of spots where she noticed her father had buried things.
Another question involved Gertrude’s possible complicity in the Augusta Steinbach case. At first, Gertrude appeared to be an innocent teenager dragged into the seedy affair by her father, but then Adele Ullrich Braun walked into Gillespie’s office. Her story made Gertrude look like an accomplice in her father’s scheming—a spy’s spy—but Gillespie wondered if her depiction of Gertrude was more of a character assassination than a pattern he could apply to the Steinbach case. Besides, Schmidt appeared to be a master manipulator; his every wish became his daughter’s command. She did whatever he said, without question, including repeating his fictions about Anita and the Baersch woman. He trained her so well that Gertrude continued to fib during various interviews with the authorities.
Still, Adele’s statements raised suspicion about Gertrude’s role—if any—in her father’s entrapment of Augusta Steinbach. Perhaps if detectives could convince her to leave her hotel room, Agnes Domaniecki would provide some insight.
Reporters who eavesdropped on the confrontation between Gertrude Schmidt and Adele Ullrich Braun scrambled from the prosecutor’s office, and within hours of hearing Adele describe Braun’s allegations of espionage, they had filed their stories. Schmidt wasn’t just a Bluebeard anymore; headlines across the nation transformed him into an international superspy.
The New York Times ran a front-page story under the headline, “SAYS SLAYER WAS A SPY.” The correspondent reported, “The Code of the Prussian spy, not fear of the consequences of Augusta Steinbach’s death, drove Helmuth Schmidt to commit suicide…according to Mrs. Emil Braun.”108
Adele’s allegations set the rumor mill churning in Pontiac. People began to question Sheriff O.H.P. Green’s suicide. They wondered if the spy shot the sheriff to stop the investigation. A Detroit News correspondent noted that what was once a laughable scenario, that “a slayer had crept into the room, fired the fatal shot and made his escape after changing the empty shell from his gun to that of the sheriff’s,” now appeared a more likely conclusion given Schmidt’s new status as a superspy.109
An item in the Detroit News noted, “The actions of Sheriff Green shortly before he took his own life or was slain by Schmidt are being studied by the present authorities of Oakland County for possible further light on the Schmidt case.”110
The new information about Anita Schmidt and the mysterious Margareta Baersch also led to headlines that indicted Schmidt for multiple murders. The front-page headline of the Detroit Times’ four o’clock edition, in a massive font that consumed one-third of the entire page, declared what everyone now accepted as fact: “SCHMIDT SLEW FIVE WOMEN, IS BELIEF.”111
Number 418 Glendale Avenue, Detroit, as it appeared in April 1918. Sketch by R.P. Buhk.
While Adele Ullrich Braun confronted Gertrude in Gillespie’s office, municipal workers continued to spade up Schmidt’s Glendale Avenue property under the watchful eyes of Detectives Reid and Dibble.
Grace De Planta’s statement provided a hot lead. Her husband had spotted a wheelbarrow of sand near the basement steps, and Gertrude told of her father removing a root cellar, although she didn’t remember exactly where in the basement the original walls had been.
Since the cellar floor appeared undisturbed, investigators theorized that Schmidt may have removed some of the foundation blocks and buried something in a cavity outside the wall. This would explain the wheelbarrow of dirt Frederick De Planta spotted in the basement. So, they unearthed the entire foundation along the east side, creating a gigantic trench and a massive pile of sand. But they found nothing. While the kids of Glendale Avenue played in a gigantic sandbox created by the excavators, the work crew turned the garden upside down, but again, their efforts yielded nothing.
As the workers searched for traces of the missing woman at Schmidt’s Detroit property, Pallatinus’s sister, Minna Rederer, searched for traces of her sister at his Royal Oak bungalow. She wandered through the house looking for some of Irma’s belongings. “Ach mein lieber,” she whispered, as she spotted one of her sister’s dresses.
THE CHUM
Pontiac, Michigan
Friday evening, April 26, 1918
By late afternoon, Agnes had finally come out of her room and traveled to Pontiac, where she gave a detailed statement to Prosecutor Gillespie.
As Agnes walked into Gillespie’s office, he handed her the postcard sent to Hetherington. Agnes carefully examined it. Although she wasn’t sure about the handwriting of the text, she was certain that the signature was Augusta’s. Apparently, Schmidt, posing as Neugebauer, asked Augusta to write out the card so her mail would go to his good friend Schmidt after the nuptials. The gullible woman with dreams of marital bliss wouldn’t have thought twice about the request.
While Augusta had apparently inked the postcard, Helen Schmidt had written the letter asking Mina Hofbauer to mail it from New York. Either Schmidt had tricked his wife into abetting his scheme, or she did it with full knowledge of his intentions. Perhaps Agnes would be able to provide some clues about Helen’s true culpability.
Agnes began by describing her best friend. “Augusta was always looking out for me. She was such a kind, generous-hearted girl. If there was anything she had which I wanted or which she believed would look well on me she always wanted me to take it. Whenever I went out evenings she would always warn me to be careful because she was afraid some harm would befall me.”
Agnes smiled. “Even when we were in Paris she told me I should be more careful about going out nights because I couldn’t speak French. I used to laugh at her and tell her that no one would molest me.” Augusta, she said, spent most of her adult life taking care of other people’s homes and desperately longed for one of her own, which made her a prime target for Schmidt’s purple prose. “She was a great lover of the home and was content to remain there when others were going to the theaters or to dances,” Agnes explained. “She often told me she found her comfort in the home. She wanted a husband and a family and a home of her own and it was this feeling which led up to her answering Neugebauer’s ad in the paper.”112
Neugebauer’s prose enchanted Augusta, but Agnes wasn’t fooled. She begged Augusta to stay in New York, but Augusta didn’t listen. Tears formed at the corners of Agnes’s eyes as she recalled the morning of February 3, 1917, when she took Augusta to the train station. “I hated to have Augusta go so far away to live, but she comforted me by saying that she could come back if everything wasn’t all right. Even in the train when she was leaving I cried on her shoulder and begged her not to go. She and I had been such good friends I hated to be separated from her.”113
“Das heiraten teufel,” Agnes moaned. “She married the devil.”
Then, when Augusta arrived in the Motor City, things seemed to be all right:
When I got all her happy letters she wrote from her boarding house with the Hetheringtons at 45 Adelaide Street, I felt better. She told me how Mr. Schmidt had taken her out to a pretty bungalow in Royal Oak where they were going to live after getting married, and how she had met his two “fine sisters.” She said one was a widow, and the youngest one, whose name she said was Gertrude, was so sweet and a fine musician. In one letter she wrote: “Now as I write his sisters are fixing a fine dinner. His oldest sister is a good housekeeper. They are planning a big wedding for me and I do not like it because I want a quiet one. They are going to fix the house up before we get married, because they want it all in good order for me. His big sister thinks I look pale, and she wants me to take a good rest.”114
Gillespie leaned forward in his chair. Agnes made a similar comment a few months earlier in New York, but with Neugebauer now unmasked, the “sisters” assumed a new, more sinister significance. If Augusta Steinbach met Neugebauer’s sisters, there was only one logical explanation: the “sisters” must have been Helen and Gertrude Schmidt, which meant that Schmidt used them to trick her. This contradicted Helen’s previous statements—she had steadfastly denied ever meeting Augusta Steinbach—and hinted at her possible complicity in the murder.
But Agnes had discarded the letters, so she was going from memory. And as Gillespie knew from countless hours of examining and cross-examining witnesses, memories often become distorted. As far as evidence, it amounted to uncorroborated hearsay.
Agnes continued. “Then Augusta wrote about the fine furniture, piano, sewing machine, etc. in the house. She said he had lots of fine jewelry and silver which his mother left when she died in Pommen, Germany, and he was going to give it all to her. She kept on writing to me until the 10th of March. Just before then she wrote and asked for her linens and her trunks to be sent to Royal Oak and I shipped them by express to her.”115
Augusta wrote one final letter, dated March 10, 1917. Augusta, Agnes recalled, said that “between the 10th and the 17th of March she was going with Neugebauer to his brother-in-law’s home to be married by a priest friend of theirs. She didn’t say where this friend lived, but asked me not to write for four weeks as she would be away that long on a wedding trip. Her handwriting in that letter and the last few I got from her looked so scrawly and funny not at all like the careful way she used to write.”116 Gillespie wished Agnes had kept at least one of these letters for the sharp eye of Francis Courtney.
“That was the last I heard from my dear, best friend. All of my other letters addressed to 45 Adelaide Street were returned to me. She was a good, clean, honest girl, and it is terrible to think she met such a frightful end. I was coming out to visit her. Maybe he would have done away with me, too.”
When her letters came back stamped “return to sender,” Agnes became worried and started making inquiries. “A married woman friend of mine whom I asked for advice when I didn’t hear from Augusta, wrote to a relative of hers, who worked in Detroit, and asked him to look her up.” A few weeks later, Agnes received word from Detroit. “She wrote back that he found out that up to May 5, Augusta was keeping company with Schmidt. I don’t know where he found this out.”117
By this point, Agnes knew that something was wrong. “I had a presentiment that all was not right from the first and it grew on me until I used to lay awake nights and dream the awfullest things about Augusta and Neugebauer. I remember one night that I dreamed I saw a big savage man standing over Augusta and he was hacking away at her with a big sword.”118 As investigators had discovered a few days earlier at 9 Oakdale, though, it wasn’t a sword—it was a meat cleaver.
THE FIFTH WIFE
Pontiac, Michigan
Friday evening, April 26, 1918
By Friday afternoon, investigators had discovered the identities of the four women Schmidt had allegedly married (formally): Anita Schmidt, Adele Ullrich Braun, Irma Pallatinus and Helen Schmidt. On Friday evening, they discovered a possible fifth.
Detroit chief of police Remember Kent received a telegram from New York attorney Marion Gold Lewis, who saw Schmidt’s photograph in a news item about the case. Kent brought the telegram to Glenn Gillespie in Pontiac. Gillespie just shook his head as he read the note.
“I have been trying for many months to locate a man known in New York as John Switt who married a client of mine,” Lewis wrote, “and after staying with her three days took $1,400 and departed to purchase, as he said, railroad tickets for Detroit, Michigan. This was in December, 1914, and since which 17 day of December she has been looking for him. He said he was a machinist and had great prospects in Detroit.”119
According to Lewis, Switt’s things contained a clue that at first went unnoticed but later hinted at an alias. “He left his trunk with napkins, tablecloths, etc., in a furnisher room, but the initials on the napkins, etc., were not J.S. Of course, after his desertion my client knew she had been tricked.” Gillespie thought of Adele, who found items marked “H.S.” among her husband’s things. Did the “H.S.” initials also appear on “John Switt’s” napkins? He continued reading.
“I write now to ascertain if this could have been the same man known to your people as ‘Helmuth Schmidt,’ alias Neugebauer, alias George Rolof, alias Brown. The man I am after claimed he came from Bohemia, and was the son of Joseph and Maria Haids and was about 40 years old, quite tall, fair hair with dark eyes, and slender.”120
Gillespie set the telegram on his desk and fingered through a pile of papers until he found the county’s record of Schmidt’s marriage to Helen Tietz. The record listed the groom’s father’s name as “Julius” and his mother’s name as “Marie Benzin.”121 The names were not identical to the parents of “John Switt,” but they were close—not beyond the possibility of a clerk’s error or a mistranslation. Of course, Schmidt may have lied about their names in the first place if Switt was Schmidt.
The prosecutor smiled as he recognized the irony in the next line of Lewis’s telegram: “I wrote to the Ford Motor Works asking if they had the man in their employ but they could give me no information.” Schmidt was known as “Ullrich” at the Ford plant, and it was not until Jonathan Welch linked “Adolph Ullrich” to his neighbor in 1917 that anyone knew that Ullrich and Schmidt were one and the same. Schmidt’s work alias proved to be a dead end to anyone looking for a “Switt.”
Lewis continued: “If my description in any way tallies with the man who was known as Schmidt, I could get my client to start west at once, or if you had a photograph likeness of him, I wish you would send it to me, as we are trying to have some trace of whether our man is alive or not.”122
The letter’s description only partly fit Schmidt. The Highland Park cops described him as thirty-eight years old and five-foot-seven, with a swarthy complexion and dark hair. John Switt, according to Lewis’s letter, had “fair hair.” But the Lakewood “wanted” leaflet noted that Schmidt was likely to dye his hair, and Schmidt did leave New Jersey and take a machinist job in Detroit. New York was a short trip due north from Lakewood. Did Emil Braun travel to the Big Apple for a weekend tryst and come away with the life savings of a woman named Anna Hocke?
Gillespie looked at the timeline he made and inked in two new dates.
Dec. 13–19, 1914: Margareta Baersch disappears
Dec. 14, 1914: as “John Switt,” marries Anna Hocke in New York
Dec. 17, 1914: abandons Anna Hocke Switt
Dec. 30, 1914: as “Emil Braun,” Schmidt marries Adele Ullrich
April 24, 1915: abandons Adele; moves to Detroit with Irma Pallatinus and changes his name to “Adolph Ullrich”
Sept., 1915: as “Herman Scharno,” begins correspondence relationship with Helen Tietz
Dec. 20, 1915: Irma Pallatinus disappears sometime before this date
Dec. 22, 1915: as Helmuth Schmidt, marries Helen Tietz
Feb. 9, 1917: as “Herman Neugebauer,” meets Augusta Steinbach
Mar. 11, 1917: Augusta Steinbach disappears
Investigators believed that Schmidt had constantly run matrimonial advertisements through German-language newspapers for years before his capture. It looked like they were right. Since the story broke, national newspapers had been running front-page stories containing a head-and-shoulders photograph of Helmuth Schmidt, and each day, it seemed, led to new revelations about the Royal Oak Bluebeard.
Gillespie immediately sent a photograph to Lewis. As he licked the envelope, he thought about the six golden lockets found in Schmidt’s Royal Oak “murder plant” and the cop’s remark about a fishing lure.
THE TREASURE HOUSE
Royal Oak, Michigan
Saturday morning, April 27, 1918
On Saturday morning, there was a flurry of activity at 9 Oakdale in Royal Oak. Glenn Gillespie had asked Agnes Domaniecki to tour the treasure-trove and identify articles that belonged to Augusta Steinbach. At first, she didn’t want to go, but eventually she agreed. She knew that investigators would never find the rest of Augusta’s body, but perhaps somewhere in the house she would find Augusta in spirit, which would help her say goodbye.
She trembled as she climbed the porch steps. Gillespie held out his arm, and she grasped on to it as she made her way across the threshold and into the front room, all the time imagining Augusta—poor, dumb Augusta—waltzing through the front door with the deluded belief that marriage with Herman Neugebauer waited on the other side.
Inside the bungalow, she stopped shaking and unhooked herself from Gillespie’s arm, steeling herself for the discoveries she knew she would make inside. She patted him on the forearm as if to say thank-you. She was ready. Gillespie wondered, as he noticed tears forming at the edges of Agnes’s eyes, if the woman’s nerves would hold as she went through “das teufel’s” lair. Then again, he thought as he watched her examine some jewelry, Agnes had done more than anyone else to bring down Michigan’s Bluebeard. If there were any trace of Augusta, she would find it. The domestic immediately found bits and pieces from Augusta’s trousseau.
Each new discovery came with a gasp and then a whimper as Agnes choked back the tears and uttered an occasional “Das heiraten teufel.” But she kept looking, eventually identifying several items of jewelry that belonged to her chum: a gold watch, a golden locket and chain and a diamond ring. She also found several pieces of clothing that Augusta brought from New York, including a black fox wrap. Looking through Gertrude’s closet, Agnes spotted a fancy pink bathrobe that she herself wore on occasion. In Helen’s closet, she found Augusta’s blue silk gown.
